


Don't worry, Baby

by MilkshakeKate



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Comfort, F/M, Five Times, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Pining, Protective Illya, Sharing Clothes, Teamwork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 05:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13047450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilkshakeKate/pseuds/MilkshakeKate
Summary: The first time he sees Gaby in his clothes, it does not comfort him.





	Don't worry, Baby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainbowjaeger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowjaeger/gifts).



In Illya's field of work, clothing is something to be read.   

The cut of a suit can be the indicator of a mark's wealth, values, impulsiveness. A black overcoat can be the only descriptor, hissed frantically through his transmitter, for a figure turning down a dead-end street. An exquisite evening gown can conceal a Walther PPK, spotted only when one knows just what to look for – and Illya does.   

But clothing, Illya finds, can also be a comfort.   

A watch delivered by a diplomat in black.    

An heirloom ring sent  _par avion._     

He has kept both, and to have these items is to keep their wearer close. Here, he still has his father’s handshake, his mother’s graceful hands. Illya buckles the watch each morning, lays it on his bedside table each night. He keeps the ring in its dusty velvet box, tucked down deep and checked often, in the false bottom of his camera bag. It is comforting, when Illya can't be with the ones he loves, to hold close the things they'd once worn.   

The first time he sees Gaby in his clothes, it does not comfort him.   

    

     
1   

Milan, February 1964   

    

“She is not wearing that.”     
     
Solo lays the dress over the crook of his arm, gestures to it as if Illya is looking at something else entirely. “This is Dior.”     
     
“It is ridiculous.”     
     
The hideous thing is more like a matador’s muleta to Illya, who had protested it in the boutique and will continue to do so until his death.   

“And here I thought you’d be fond of red.” Napoleon hands Gaby a pair of earrings over the suite's dressing screen, which she wrinkles her nose at, and which Illya hears being dropped to the floor soon after.   

Gaby peers out from behind the screen. “Do I get a say in this?”   

“No,” they agree, for the first time tonight.   

“So you two can choose your suits, your ugly ties, and I have to take what’s given to me?”   

Illya lays a hand on his tie, frowning.   

“That’s right,” says Solo.   

“Don’t worry,” Illya assures her. “You will not wear that dress. I will pick suitable replacement.”   

Gaby storms out from behind the screen and Illya immediately reels back, spins on his heel to face the window instead. Unable to escape her reflection there, he tears the curtains closed and, on noticing the unusual silence of his partner, Illya hunts behind him for Napoleon’s shoulder to throw him around too.  

When Gaby slams the door to one of the suite’s bedrooms, Solo removes himself from Illya’s grasp to lay the dress over the back of the chaise.   

“There’s nothing wrong with the dress, Peril.”   

“I expect no less of American taste,” he mutters, scowling at the offending red smock.   

“Something tells me there’s only something wrong with Gaby’s objective. A certain—” he makes a noncommittal gesture, “—conflict of interest.”   

Illya stares at him. “What are you talking about?”   

Solo opens his mouth, and Illya predicts everything due to come out of it. The accusations that Illya is jealous, that he thinks Gaby is too good for this sort of work, that the mark is an animal and that, above all, it is far too cold outside for Gaby to wear anything made of satin.    

Illya’s offering of a Cardin mini dress and matching capelet is far more practical — room for concealed carry, short enough to run in, and it is Gaby’s preferred cut besides. It has nothing to do with jealousy. It is Gaby’s comfort he has in mind, her ease of movement, her escape… from the handsy Austrian duke she has been instructed to schmooze with. Illya is busy translating this concept into simple enough English for Solo to understand when he’s interrupted by a fierce nudge to the ribs.   

“Well?” comes a confident smirk from behind them.   

Solo’s open mouth remains so, until it contorts into a delighted little smile. “Gaby, you’re a vision. What do you think, Illya?”   

Rolling his glare at his partner, Illya turns — and halts.   

Gaby pulls the rings of her black suede boots over her knees, and she raises her brow at him, both to invite his critique and to assure him that it doesn’t matter one bit.   

A hot flush rises up the back of Illya’s neck. He reaches for his own tie again solely for something to do with his hands.   

She’s wearing his turtleneck — a makeshift mini dress, with the long sleeves folded neatly to her mid-forearm and a pair of her own earrings grazing her shoulders. It’s chic. It’s seasonally appropriate.   

It’s mortifying.   

“You—” Illya swallows, shakes his head for far too long. Napoleon’s smirk only grows, and he’s already guiding Gaby over to their selection of coats for her to choose from. Illya shadows them, vibrating with panic, with shock, with something far, far deeper in his stomach correlating precisely to the hem of his sweater, and where it grazes her bare thighs. “She is  _not_  wearing that!”   

    

    

2     
     
Paris, April 1964   

      
The weather in Paris is as changeable as London's. Gaby’s thin dress is sleeveless, and as Illya walks with her along the Canal Saint-Martin, she grasps her arms to stem her shivering.   

Illya tightens his jaw.   

“I told you to bring coat.”   

“This get-up was your bright idea,” she mutters back. “It’s ten degrees. Chiffon, you insisted, so it’s chiffon you get.”   

A flurry of wet blossoms swirls around Gaby’s heels, sending a gust of wind up her dress. She drops Illya’s elbow to flatten the fabric front and back, scowling at him fiercely.   

Illya quickly looks away, scans around the park. An old man on a nearby bench takes a very sudden interest in his newspaper.   

“Here,” Illya grumbles, shrugging out of his coat. The brisk wind immediately prickles through his shirt. He is wary of Gaby at times like this; certain gestures can turn her nose up or earn him the cold shoulder. But today she accepts, settling her shoulders so he can drape the black crombie over them. Gaby threads her hands through the armholes, rustles in the mass of excess fabric. The sleeves are far too long, so she pushes them up in a bundle and makes a start on the buttons.   

The hem is only inches from the ground.   

Biting his cheek, Illya steers her around a puddle to preserve the wool. Gaby keeps up with him, toying with the buttons on the cuffs and peering around the park, having won.   

Illya tries not to concentrate on the thought of her in a garment he has warmed himself. Tries not to think of how they must look like this, walking by a Parisian canal together. The blossoms, the tulips, their slow pace. She and him. She with another ring on her finger. She in his coat, in his coat, in his coat.    

He, staring at her for far too long to seem anything but a besotted idiot.   

Gaby pulls the coat closer around her shoulders. “Better,” she mumbles.   

Illya wonders if this sort of thing will ever be so unremarkable to him that it won’t make his blood pressure spike, or turn his breathing light and shallow.   

He doubts it. He doubts it because it has been almost a year since he’d met her, and still her private little smiles make him as inwardly giddy as a school boy.   

“Good,” Illya says, too gruffly.  

When Gaby loops her arm back through his, he casts his eyes to the pavement.   

    

3   

London, October 1964   

    

As soon as they’re through the door, Illya deposits her in his sitting room and hurries for the bathroom. Bath tap running hot and his towelling robe torn from its hook, he rushes back out to find Gaby peeling off her clothes and shivering, the sodden mass of ruined couture pooling at her feet. She wraps her arms around her own waist, turns her wide eyes on him as she shudders on the spot.   

Illya averts his gaze and holds his dressing gown out wide, urges her hands into the sleeves. The bare skin between her shoulders is damp and paling and riddled with goosebumps. There is a dead leaf stuck to her spine, which he quickly peels off before pulling the dressing gown over her shoulders. Then he steers her towards the electric heater, flicks it on to three bars. Gaby shivers hard, turns and lifts her crossed arms so Illya can knot the belt tightly around her waist.   

“Stay here,” he says.   

Gaby nods blankly, teeth chattering. She carefully folds down to sit on the carpet, pulls her knees in. The bath robe’s shoulders fall half way down her arms and are slipping lower, so she pinches them to sit properly on her small frame, nuzzles into the collar to warm her chest with her breath.   

Illya could fall to the floor for it.   

Instead he disappears to his bedroom. When he returns with a thick pair of socks, she is kneeling up in front of the warming glow of the heater and poking around his mantelpiece.   

It occurs to him that this is her first time here. It causes him hesitation. Illya knows the consensus at HQ. Gaby is the only one to ever have been invited inside; the only one discover that Illya Kuryakin does in fact live in a commonplace apartment, with a carpet and furniture, and not an abandoned munitions factory. In all his rush to tend to her, to wrap her up, he is just now aware of every inch of his domicile, and he fears what she must think of it.   

She turns, likely feeling his stare burning into the back of her head. “Sorry,” Gaby murmurs, and puts down the compact clock she’d been fiddling with.   

Illya tsks and hands his socks to her, gestures for her to sit back down on the rug. She does, and she pulls the socks up, twists them to settle the right way. Her feet are so much smaller that the knitted heels land half way up her calves.   

Now that there is little else he can do, his sitting room suddenly seems very, very quiet. Gaby combs shakily through her river-wet hair with her fingers, arranges it in a loose twist down her back, and waits.   

“The bath will be ready soon,” Illya says.   

Gaby nods again. She is so small in his bathrobe, wet and shivering like a cat caught in the rain. Illya feels utterly useless, standing here. Whatever he wants to do, deep in his heart, he can’t fathom a way to do it. There is a strong urge in his chest to scoop her up and check her every limb for fractures, for flesh wounds. She had skidded into the water with such a commotion, the motorcycle’s engine roaring, wheels spinning as it juddered over the cobbles and down the bank. A bullet in the tyre, another in the tank, inches from her bare calf. The wildest streak of panic on her face...   

Anything but diving in after her hadn’t been an option — his body had thrown him into the river without pause, with Illya’s vision blurred by the thought of her helmet flooding with water, her muscles freezing with the shock of the cold, the impact.   

Illya looks at her now, at her damp hair and the pink shine to her nose, her shoulders in his bath robe and the wad of his sleeves rolled up past her wrists. She sniffs gently, and Illya ignores everything else in the room but the pull in his chest.  

With Gaby already curled up in his robe by the fireside, and with Illya far too cowardly to wrap her up and soothe the worried lines from her brow, there is little more he can do than be a good host.  

"Tea,” he says, with unflinching conviction.   

“Oh, I'm fine.”   

“Tea.”   

On his return, he hands the mug to her too. Gaby huffs slightly but soon softens when the warmth of the mug begins to thaw her hands, and she sips gratefully. 

Illya lowers to the carpet, fully aware of her scrutinous gaze as he goes. 

Enduring his flinching she still reaches over, brushes his hair from his forehead.   

“Thank you,” she says. “But you smell like the river as well.”   

Illya tsks again. Her voice isn’t shaking anymore, her cheeks are regaining their colour. Gaby, bundled up in his dressing gown, his socks, sipping his tea by the light of his gas fire... He hadn’t given himself a second thought.   

He remembers the bath, the running water, and stands to check on it.   

Gaby stands too, pushing her mug onto the mantelpiece and skirting around him to get there first. She ducks under his arm and she blocks his way to the bathroom, peers up at him.   

“Coming in?”    

Before Illya’s mind can catch up with his open mouth she is reaching up to cup the back of his head. Her hand is hot from her tea, her eyes warm with invitation.   

“Next time,” he manages, slowly circling her wrist, “I take motorbike.”   

Her lips, too, are warmer now.    

-   

With her head on his chest, Gaby assures him she likes his flat. Tells him that his sparse furniture and his tidy piles of books are very  _him_ , and that she had expected no less, coming here.   

But he has nothing to fear; she'll confirm to the secretary pool that he sleeps on a concrete slab, if that’s what he wants.   

    

    

4   

Chianti, December 1964   

    

They’re lingering at the end of a cypress lined road, quarter of a mile from the gates to the Tuscan estate. If Gaby’s cover could afford her the driver’s seat, she would be tapping on the steering wheel, impatience striding through her arms. Rather, she is sat in the back of the borrowed Rolls Royce with Illya, who continues to shift around beside her in his ill-fitting chauffeur’s uniform. Her focus is entirely on the road ahead, anxiously peering through the windscreen, though Illya switched off the ignition ten minutes ago. 

The car is allowed no further into the grounds. Men and women in fine coats and regalia stroll by, but they don’t bother to investigate the car's curtained windows— the sights and sounds of another annual THRUSH party is pulling them in. Gaby is only another of a fifty heiresses due to join them shortly.

Illya re-buckles the strap around her bared thigh, twists it so his holster sits neatly under her dress.  It had been designed for his calf, but it suits the soft patch above Gaby’s knee just fine. He stares at it, checks it three times.   

“Emergencies,” Illya reminds her. 

She covers his stuttering hand with hers to steady it, and nods.   

Solo is already undercover but still manages to intrude on their privacy as always, this time via a microphone in her necklace. He must be asking her to test the connection, because Gaby says “Testing,” and she hums something Illya doesn’t recognise, jittery and off-key.   

“Show me again,” Illya murmurs.   

Gaby flicks his knife out from its holster, lightening quick. Again, he says, and she does before neatly tucking it away.   

“Believe me now?”    

Illya turns her hand in his, urging her to look him in the eye. “You are nervous?”   

She shakes her head, swallows. “No.”   

He believes that. This isn’t nerves, it’s adrenaline. He has already assured her that he will be in the hedgerows down the lawn, his sniper trained on the perimeter guards. She will make her way down to the vaults, arm in arm with the asset, as she has done one hundred times before. Napoleon’s direction will be in her ear and Illya’s knife will be at her thigh. She is calm, she is focused.   

Why then, if he believes this, is Illya’s heart hammering in his chest? Something is different. Part of him feels helpless, like he is dropping her off in the centre of a minefield. The sight of his holster around her thigh ought to have calmed him — he had relied on it, the assurance of a borrowed weapon, of the most reliable in his arsenal. The knife isn’t authorised but he’d insisted on it, demanded she take it with her. This is what Waverly meant by compartmentalisation: Gaby is her own woman. Gaby is an agent, just like he and Solo, and he should trust her judgement.   

But he’d like to hear her say it all the same. Hear that his borrowed knife and makeshift holster are as good as his shadow at her back.    

“Don’t worry,” Gaby whispers to him. Or to Solo, he can’t tell. But she is taking him in very tenderly, and her grip on his hand is unwavering, supporting him, though he ought to be the one supporting her. Gaby Teller sees straight through him, always, and there is no use pretending his fear is for her safety alone when the thought of losing her is rending his chest in two. “I’ve done this before.”   

    

    

5   

London, March 1965   

 

She still makes fun of him for worrying, but she no longer asks him to stop.      

“Show me again,” Gaby says. 

Kneeling up on the carpet, Illya adjusts his grip on her pyjamas — his pyjamas — and shifts her back down the rug.  He sits back on his heels and tugs her hips to meet him, locking her in a mock wrestling position to try again.

“Arms locked, hands on shoulders. Here,” he rests his weight on one palm, guides hers to the place they belong. “You must be quic—”   

Gaby jolts, throws her bare foot up to glance off his hip and thrust herself out of his grasp — but Illya grabs on, pulls her back to the start again with ease. Like clockwork, his thighs are pressed to the underside of hers again, right where they started.   

She huffs. The morning sunlight is streaming through his sitting room window, covering her in gold stripes. The sun is in her eyes, so he shields them.   

“You still want me to show you?”   

Gaby presses both palms to his collarbones again, breathes heavily through her nose. “Yes.”   

Illya nods. He straightens his pyjama shirt on her shoulders, brushes her hair behind her ears so she can see properly.   

Her face is a complex blend of distraction and determination; here is all the intensity of Gaby’s stubbornness, her professionalism. She is troubled by her physicality this morning; by the futility of her singular strength, her whole body softer now than when she was a first soloist, and after her garage work in East Berlin. She is angry, still, for being compromised at the height of a mission. Unable to overthrow some underling in their latest THRUSH coup, Gaby has since been attending accelerated defence classes at HQ, and has even taken to tackling Illya down on Sunday mornings.   

Not that he is complaining. 

She had suffered another slew of nightmares last night. When the sun rose she’d kissed him softly awake, and had stolen his pyjamas from his bottom drawer when the frosty spring morning proved too cold to bear. She'd rolled the waist and turned up the legs so they wouldn’t drag on the floor — that had warmed Illya, straight to the core.    

There is nothing so perfect as a sleepy Gaby in the morning, hair mussed and skin bright from the night before. Hadn't he dreamt of this for months? The warmth of her in his arms, the scent of her skin and his clothes together had been a cocoon he had never wanted to leave. Had she not asked him to help her, Illya would still be nosing into the honeyed scent of her hair, trying to get back to sleep.   

Now they are on his sitting room carpet, grappling at each other and trying not to discuss why she had asked for this.   

“Enemy agent will not give you second chance,” Illya reminds her, when she fails to land another kick to his chest.   

“I know that,” she grits.   

“Again.”   

He’s kneeling over her, her knees bracketing his ribs when she jolts to the side, treading into his hip and propelling herself out of his brace. She rocks back, kicks just inches from his face — he grabs her ankle. Not complete, but it is the farthest she has gotten in this routine without fault. Pride swells in Illya’s chest.   

He smiles down at her. “Good.”   

Gaby peers back up at him haltingly. Her face is a picture of doubt.    

Before Illya can question her she reaches for his hands. Her jaw is tight, and she is searching him all over; little darts of her dark eyes, as if he is too close to take in all at once. She is getting a read on him here, gauging him, as if he is an ailing, intricate machine she has never seen before, and she won’t hurry to take him apart.

Threading her fingers through his, Gaby presses Illya’s whole palm to the pocket of his pyjama shirt. Her heart is rabbiting away, airy and delicate and quick. Covering his watch face with her palm, Gaby lets him feel the rhythm of her pulse, looking for repulsion in him, for hesitance, before pulling him to lie down on her fully, chest to chest.

Gaby wraps her arms around Illya's broad back, holds him there tightly.   

    

\+ 1   

Rijeka, August 1965   

    

Gaby’s hair is crisp with saltwater, her skin soaking up the early morning sun.   

She has never known what to do with time off. At the garage she couldn’t simply idle around at home; the work picked at her, stole her attention. Leisure time was eaten into by concern for the cars she’d left behind, and the apprentice she hadn’t yet trusted enough not to go rifling through her tools.   

Now she is off the clock. Two weeks for good behaviour, and Illya had accepted her invitation to Croatia for sun and sea and privacy.   

At just eight o’clock in the morning, they are the only ones here. The beach is a pebbled slip of a thing, with barely a stretch between the shoreline and the steep rock face behind them, the slimmest separation between the seawater and the sleepy town above. The pale sun is large and cool on the horizon, promising to warm the water within a couple of hours.   

Her limbs are still tired from all the heat and food and lack of any schedule at all. Even Illya is limber, almost relaxed. His hair is blonder here and his hairline paler than his face, having been burnished by days and days of squinting over whitewashed walls, marbled tiles, glittering coastline.   

Yesterday, swimming here had been like wading into the world’s largest lukewarm bath. There had been very few visitors then, all through the afternoon. Some bright towels laid out for a young family picnic, two older ladies swimming breast stroke in the far corner of the cove. The solitude in peak tourist season had worried Illya: _perhaps the locals know something we don’t,_ he’d suggested. _Or,_ Gaby had retorted, rubbing sun tan oil into her thighs and between his shoulders, _we know something they don’t._    

Isn’t that always the way? What a treat to be a tourist, oblivious and off duty, with Illya in a pair of beach shorts and admiring her now like she’s brighter than the sun.   

He’s certainly squinting at her like she is. He has been squinting at her all day, contemplating something very serious, as if she is hiding something from him and he is preparing to flinch from the shock.   

Since their very first day he has been hesitant to swim. He hadn't wanted to lose their spot in the shade, or to leave his camera bag in the sand unattended. He'd stood there, resolute and unmoving, guarding their patch from invisible thieves on this deserted beach.

That is, until Gaby disappeared under the water and left him no choice but to drag her back out.   

It was his fault, she’d insisted, that his sunglasses had fallen off and sunk to the bottom of the sea bed. _What impulse does he have, diving into the water after her everywhere she goes?_ He hadn’t laughed at that, but she had pushed the frown off his mouth with a segment of a clementine from their picnic basket, kissed him apologetically, light and feathery, until she tasted of it too.   

Illya leans over now to brush a stripe of sun cream onto her cheekbone with his thumb, but he is still squinting.   

“I have a surprise for you,” Gaby says, and Illya is immediately suspicious.   

She rifles around in her beach bag for them — an old pair of sunglasses, round and too large — and gentles them onto Illya’s nose.   

"There," she says with authority. "These suit you much better."   

She brushes his blond hair back, smooths over his furrowed brow, and even in a silly pair of sunglasses he is unfathomably handsome and morose. Seeing her own reflection in the lenses, and his hesitance underneath them, Gaby pulls him closer to kiss his unamused mouth. His lips, having succumbed to a swim in the sea with her today, taste like salt.

When he finally kisses her back, she pulls away to beam at him.   

Illya pushes the sunglasses up into his hair. He has stopped squinting, but is now looking at her like he does when she wears his coat, when she steals his jacket, when she puts on his slippers to pick up their post. If ever she misses that look, she finds something new of his to wear and she's gifted it in droves — this is an exception to his brooding that she had learned early, and knows just when to employ it. In only his beach shorts she has nothing to steal from him, so Gaby settles back on her hands and lets him look, waiting for him.   

"I have surprise for you, too,” Illya decides. The sun has finally bleached the trouble out of him, his strange mood washed away.   

Gaby sits back up. "Oh?"   

There’s certainty in him. His squinting is only for the brightness of the sand, and the crinkle by his eyes just a smile he has nearly grown used to.    

Illya picks up her left hand, and pulls out a dusty velvet box from the bottom of his camera bag.  

  

 


End file.
